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SUMO 2.4 – The end of the tunnel

Two weeks ago, we released SUMO 2.4, completing a year-long project to replace the SUMO platform!

SUMO 2.4 moved the last bits of functionality into Kitsune, our Django-based platform. These include user features like login/logout, registration, and profiles.

This represents a significant milestone and success for the SUMO project, and is particularly meaningful to the development team. We’ve been working toward this since January 2010, and seeing it completed is an amazing feeling.

Over the past year we’ve progressively replaced pieces of our old platform with new code:

In May, we took our first step by transitioning to new Search Result Pages.

In July, we switched the Discussion Forums, and started authenticating users in both systems.

In August, we turned on the new Support Forum section.

In September, we added the new Army of Awesome, built very rapidly on the new platform.

Just recently, in November, we brought the new Knowledge Base, the largest, and most complex part of SUMO, online.

And with 2.4, we’ve brought over the last piece, User Accounts.

This final step in the migration to Kitsune opens up a bunch of new doors for features and improvements. For example, user registration is much simpler now. We’re transitioning data internally to be more secure. The entire site is faster and puts a lot less load on our servers, meaning we can serve more traffic with the same hardware.

We are especially happy we were able to complete this transition before the Firefox 4 release. Being entirely on the new platform gives us more confidence in our ability to keep helping users even with traffic spikes from the release.

We devoted 2010 to investing in this new platform, designed specifically to make it easier for our awesome community to help 400 million Firefox users worldwide. In 2011, we’ll start seeing the payoff of that investment, for our developers, contributors, and users, and expect to see SUMO really take off!

1 response

Thanks a lot for summarizing this year for SUMO, James! It’s been pretty wild actually :D

And it looks like 2011 won’t be any less exciting. Lot’s of good stuff coming up over the next few weeks and month. SUMO is shaping up to be the premier open source support solution. I’m looking forward to the productization, as do many others I suppose.